Subject: MDL INTRODUCES CHESHIRE FOR ISIS

From: Dori Luzbetak <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 18 Mar 1999 13:27:47 -0800

CONTACT: Corbin Collins
MDL Information Systems, Inc.
(510) 895-1313, ext. 1371
[email-masked]
http://www.mdli.com
European mirror site:
http://www.mdli.co.uk

MDL INTRODUCES CHESHIRE FOR ISIS, A CHEMICAL
INTERPRETATION ENVIRONMENT FOR INDUSTRY-LEADING ISIS

--Companies Can Create Cheminformatics Business Rules, Automate the Analysis
and Manipulation of Large Volumes of Chemical Information--

SAN LEANDRO, California--March 17, 1999--MDL Information Systems, Inc. today
introduced Cheshire, a sophisticated chemical representation component that
tightly integrates a powerful chemical scripting language into the
industry-standard ISIS (Integrated Scientific Information System) framework.
Cheshire provides a software development environment for building abstract
and complex business rules that automate the analysis and interpretation of
chemical structures and that calculate chemical information from chemical
structures. The system is designed for chemical registration, data mining,
property prediction, and sophisticated chemical representation controls
within custom cheminformatics applications. Cheshire runs on both client and
server platforms within the ISIS family of products, and is portable to
future MDL architectures. MDL will demonstrate Cheshire at the meeting of
the American Chemical Society, March 22-24, booth 819, Anaheim Convention
Center.

Cheshire includes Cheshire Studio, an interactive prototyping environment
that developers can use to build, edit, and run scripts executed by the
Cheshire runtime environment, the workhorse of the Cheshire system. The
Cheshire runtime environment is exposed to users and developers directly
through several programs in the ISIS family of products--ISIS/Base,
ISIS/Object Library, ISIS for Microsoft Excel, ISIS/Host Application Program
Interface (API), ISIS Procedural Language (PL), and Chemscape. This
accessibility allows Cheshire to plug-and-play with existing discovery
systems and support the breadth of scientific applications used within the
pharmaceutical, chemical, and biotech industries. 

Cheshire enables high-level functions that can operate on entire collections
of atoms and bonds, not just individual atoms and bonds. For the developer,
this high-level abstraction makes the scripting language intuitive and easy
to program. For the end user, the abstraction enables high-level operations
such as exploring molecular fingerprints to aid in structure-activity
relationship studies. 

Cheshire's scripting language is modeled on Javascript, allowing the use of
familiar programming constructs such as objects, methods, and properties.
Cheshire comes standard with a library of sample scripts, including a part
of the chemical representation conversion rules MDL uses when building
databases such as the Available Chemicals Directory. The system also comes
with valuable example utilities, including an ISIS/Base add-in that provides
scientists working in ISIS/Base off-the-shelf access to Cheshire
capabilities. Users can extend ISIS/Base immediately with a sophisticated
chemical interpretation component to calculate physicochemical data from
structures, which helps scientists analyze chemical structures that would
otherwise require tedious manual inspection. 

"In our view, Cheshire is based on a set of abstract concepts including
'collections' and 'mappings' within an object-oriented framework," said Dr
Upali Bandara, business analyst, ZDW Scientific Information, BASF
Aktiengesellschaft. "The combination of these concepts with the rich
dictionary of basic operations allows Cheshire to cover all 
the business rules we need in the process of structure registration. The
Cheshire Studio will help us to do the programming and testing in a
remarkably efficient way."

"Cheshire fits into multiple discovery environments where different
scientists and programmers can use it to automate tasks related to in-depth
chemical structure processing in numerous ways," said Rudy Potenzone, senior
vice president of product development at MDL. "The system's robust chemical
intelligence and its sophisticated methods for analyzing and interpreting
chemistry not only enhance core ISIS products but interoperate easily in a
variety of ways with other MDL systems. We designed Cheshire to help
research organizations build a comprehensive and integrated discovery
informatics framework."

The ISIS Family and Complementary Systems

For the past seven years, ISIS solutions have provided an information
management architecture that supports the registration, retrieval, display,
and analysis of all types of scientific information. Pharmaceutical,
biotech, agrochemical, and chemical industries worldwide use ISIS
applications, which support compound-discovery research and development.
Cheshire works with 

*  ISIS/Draw, a chemically intelligent drawing program
*  ISIS/Base, a forms-based desktop database management system and/or
   client for querying and accessing corporate data sources through
ISIS/Host
*  ISIS/Object Library, an OLE interface to ISIS on the client
*  ISIS/Host API, a programmable interface to the ISIS/Host integration
   engine on the server
*  ISIS/PL, a programming language within ISIS on the client and the
   server
*  ISIS for Microsoft Excel, a data analysis tool that combines the
   spreadsheet environment of Excel with the chemical structure handling
   capabilities of ISIS
*  Chemscape, a Web-based system that provides complete ISIS structure
   and data searching capabilities from within Web browsers

Cheshire also integrates with other MDL products, including 

*  Reagent Selector, MDL's new system for selecting and obtaining
   reagents
*  Central Library, MDL's solution for combinatorial chemistry
*  The Spotfire product suite, systems for the interactive
   visualization of large data sets and chemical structures

About MDL

MDL Information Systems, Inc. is the recognized leader in discovery
informatics for the life science and chemical industries. MDL software,
content, and services provide the enterprise framework for identifying
successful new products. A wholly owned subsidiary of Elsevier Science, MDL
has offices worldwide with headquarters in San Leandro, California. 

###

Chemscape and MDL are registered trademarks and Available Chemicals
Directory, Central Library, Cheshire, ISIS, ISIS/Object Library, and Reagent
Selector are trademarks of MDL Information Systems, Inc. Microsoft is a
registered trademark of the Microsoft Corporation. Spotfire is a registered
trademark of Spotfire, Inc. All other product names may be registered
trademarks or trademarks of their respective holders.

Dori Luzbetak
Web Communications Manager
Marketing Communications
MDL Information Systems, Inc.
14600 Catalina Street
San Leandro, CA 94577
(510) 895-1313 x1652
(510) 614-3608 - FAX
[email-masked]